Welcome back to school Stockton Unified! I am so looking forward to working with our schools, teachers, staff and students, and their families this year. It’s our first year teaching to the new California standards that we call the Common Core. This means more non-fiction reading, more writing, and much more critical thinking in our classrooms. We will no longer be pacing our students through the text, but offering a wider variety of resources for learning with more emphasis on critical thinking and subject mastery. We are excited about this: We have been training our teachers and staff and have high expectations for our students.
We are also offering many of the programs our community asked for during our Local Control Accountability Plan outreach last year. You will see more counselors (a favorite of mine as I come from a counseling background), more tutoring, more academic intervention to help students who are struggling, and a number of new programs proven to help us improve early literacy and math skills, especially for English language learners.
I am proud to lead Stockton Unified this year and will be talking to you all regularly about our plans to provide our students with the best possible school experience. Don’t forget: we take attendance very seriously here at Stockton Unified. Let’s make sure our students are in class every day!
Julie Penn, Stockton Unified School District, Superintendent of Schools